The caceroladas of the restaurateurs are going to give a truce. At least for the moment. The Government of Mexico City has reached an agreement with representatives of the industry to open the face-to-face service partially on January 18 despite the critical situation of hospitals due to COVID-19 infections. For now, it will only be the terraces or the outdoor spaces, with a distance between the tables of one and a half meters, and with a reduced schedule until six in the afternoon. Despite the limitations, the owners agree that it is an important advance. “It is a great step and gives us hope,” says Germán González, vice president of CANIRAC, the National Chamber of the Restaurant and Seasoned Food Industry.
The Head of Government, Claudia Sheinbaum, imposed the return to the red traffic light on December 18 due to the accelerated growth of the contagion curve and hospital saturation. With this measure – which the city tried to delay for weeks, even when epidemiological criteria were already being met to limit activities again – all non-essential businesses and services, including restaurants, were closed. “We couldn’t take this confinement anymore. The economy is being destroyed. Our workers and collaborators are already desperate, ”says González, who is the CEO of Mayson Kayser México.
Faced with the critical situation, restaurant employees and owners began a protest this week with a saucepan. They asked the Government to let them go beyond home deliveries. The motto: “Open or die”. Guilliano Lopresti, owner of Quebracho restaurants, who put a name and face to the movement, affirms that they welcome this first agreement, but that it is insufficient for what the industry needs. “We prefer that to nothing, but we need to open up the interior spaces as well. Now we have given priority to staying together, because this is going to take a long time and we need to be together. But we are going to maintain the presence and the fight ”, says the businessman.
Thus, for now, the pans remain in “stand-by”, But they will continue to collect signatures for the opening of their Change.org petition, putting pressure on the negotiating tables —which have been arranged for every Wednesday—, and trying to raise the issue to the federal government, since they consider that the size of the crisis far exceeds the tools that the City Executive has. “It is an adjustment period of about two weeks. We are aware that we are at a peak of contagion. We have to explore all the alternatives for the outdoor spaces to be able to recalculate and then decide how to increase the indoor capacity ”, says Lopresti.
Several mayors of Mexico City were also present at the meeting held this Wednesday by the city authorities and the businessmen. The objective is that they help to locate openings in the open air that the establishments can use as a terrace. It is valued from parking and metered spaces to even public parks. Sheinbaum will give more details about these places tomorrow.
The truth is that many restaurants right now do not have terrace space, so, as the vice president of CANIRAC recognizes, this opening will not change the lives of many. But it does involve finding a balance between health and the economy. “If we all stay at home all these months, when the time comes to open, there will be nothing to open,” González maintains. The businessman considers that they provide a basic service, such as food, and that, in addition, formal premises provide a tool to combat the pandemic: the traceability of infections, thanks to QR codes.
Thanks to the triumph of the hospitality industry, other sectors are seeking to negotiate their reopening with the Government of Mexico City. The Employers’ Confederation of the Mexican Republic (Coparmex) has asked the Executive to “readjust” the strategy with which the pandemic is being fought, since in these last weeks of red light 20,000 economic units have had to close their doors. These are added to the 50,000 that existed during the rest of 2020. The president of Comparmex in Mexico City, Armando Zúñiga, has stressed that in addition to restaurants, the tourism sector and private schools are in a desperate situation.
The second wave of the pandemic has hit the capital hard, which is on the verge of hospital collapse. Hospitals are at 90% capacity and on many occasions they are rejecting new patients due to lack of space. This same Thursday, the Government has announced 500 new hospital beds (100 of them with ventilation) for the next 15 days, in total there are more than 6,700 occupied. This new year, six days in a row were chained with more than 1,000 daily deaths. The death toll in the city exceeds 24,000, but there are almost 137,000 across the country. Mexico occupies the sad fourth place in the world with the highest number of deaths from covid-19.
source https://pledgetimes.com/mexico-city-gives-in-and-agrees-to-partially-reopen-restaurants-despite-contagion-crisis/
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